concrete5 5.7: Add-On Development, Part 2

If you're a developer of concrete5 websites or add-ons that run on those websites, you should be ready for version 5.7. In this how-to, I'm going to go through how I got a relatively simple add-on ready for 5.7.

In part one of this guide, we focused on working on some backend classes, like the block and dashboard page controllers. This guide focuses on how to tackle some of the front-end changes coming in 5.7.

Block UI

Out of the box in 5.7, this is how our Email List Signup block looks:

Not terrible, but we could certainly clean up the form field alignment. In form.php, I've changed fields that look like this:

We also change the width and height of our block in the controller, and rescan it in the Dashboard. Now our block looks quite a bit nicer in edit mode.

Confirm Signup Single Page

In order to get the Confirm Signup single page to work, we need to namespace its page controller. We already moved it into the proper directory in part one. Open controllers/single_page/confirm_signup.php and change this:

Next Steps

Of course, there's plenty more you could do. You could display help messages on the dashboard page; you could integrate the database model with Doctrine ORM (instead of the Legacy Model) and much, much more. Please let us know your thoughts, and if you're interested in doing some development on 5.7, head on over to the Github repository.